The UN has a notorious record of nominating the worst violators to its watchdog committees on human rights and the status of women. This is a deliberate choice, but it can be corrected.
Would you let a convicted murderer preside over a murder trial? Or put a known spouse-beater in charge of a domestic violence watchdog?
Every so often, headlines appear recording the disturbing election by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly of yet another human rights violator to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), or yet another women’s oppressor to the UN Committee on the Status of Women (UNCSW).
‘With today’s election, human rights authority figures on the Council will now include the likes of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, and Angola, along with Qatar which was re-elected,’ read a report in 2017 by a Human Rights NGO critical of the UN.
‘The United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday overwhelmingly elected China, Cuba, Gabon, Pakistan, Russia, and Uzbekistan as members of the UN Human Rights Council. The election underscores the UN’s long record of entrusting the oversight of human rights to the very regimes who violate them most flagrantly,’ said a report in 2020 by the non-partisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
‘Women’s groups blast UN after it allows Iran to join women’s rights panel,’ ran a media headline in 2021.
Human rights scores
It’s difficult to objectively measure the human rights record of a country. There isn’t, in fact, an authoritative ranking or score by which countries can be compared.
A weak attempt is made in a paper by Christopher Fariss, Michael Kenwick and Kevin Reuning of Harvard University, who simply counted reported government-caused deaths of non-combatants to compile ‘latent human rights protection scores’ for countries (data). OurWorldInData has a useful map of the results.
This list is questionable. Qatar, for example, gets a robustly positive score, placing it in the top quintile among countries such as Finland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, despite grave concerns having been expressed about its human rights record against migrant workers, LGBT+ people and women.
The United States is surely far from perfect, but its negative score, placing it in the second-lowest quintile among Uzbekistan, Chad, Angola and Indonesia, seems excessive.
Mauritania gets a positive score, because instead of being killed, two third of its women have their genitals mutilated, which the Harvard ranking didn’t bother to count. Nor did it take into account other dimensions of human rights, such as freedom of expression, media freedom, or civil liberties.
Still, if we use the Harvard human rights protection scores to rank countries, it is notable that of the current 47 members of the UNHRC, 18 (38%) have negative scores.
That list, from worst to best, is: Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, Cameroon, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Somalia, China, India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Honduras, Uzbekistan, United States, Indonesia, Cuba, and Kazakhstan.
Among the UNHRC members with positive scores, there are also some questionable countries, such as Mauritania, Gabon, and Qatar.
Russia, which violates human rights with gay abandon, was also on the UNHRC until it was suspended by a vote in April 2022.
Freedom as a proxy
Perhaps a ranking of human freedom would offer a better proxy for broader human rights than counting only civilian deaths caused by governments.
The canonical ranking is produced by Freedom House, which scores countries on a detailed list of criteria on political rights and civil liberties, ultimately producing a single rating out of a hundred, which it translates into Free for countries scoring more than 70, Not Free for those below 30, and Partly Free for those in the middle.
Checking this ranking against the membership of the UNHRC produces equally worrying outcomes. Thirteen of its 47 members are ranked as Not Free, starting with Eritrea, Somalia, China, Libya and Sudan, all of which score 10 or less, followed by Uzbekistan, Cuba, Venezuela, Cameroon, the United Arab Emirates, Gabon, Kazakhstan, and, of course, Qatar.
A further 18 members are rated Partly Free, while only 16 are rated Free.
One has to wonder what the likes of Eritrea, China, Sudan, Somalia, Venezuela, Cuba and Qatar can teach the world about human rights. How can countries that oppress their people, imprison journalists, persecute dissidents, keep migrant labourers in conditions approaching slavery, and harshly discriminate against minority groups, possibly police the human rights status of other UN member states?
Women’s rights
The same problem crops up in the UN Committee on the Status of Women.
Iran executes women for speaking out in defence of LGBT+ rights. Its ‘morality police’, an undercover police unit officially known as the Guidance Patrol, harrasses and arrests women for failing to wear sufficiently modest clothes.
Last month, a woman was beaten to death because some of her hair was visible, which is an intolerable provocation for men, according to Sharia law. The Iranian police, in whose custody she died, have denied she was beaten, and blame the death of this healthy 22-year old woman on a pre-existing medical condition.
The incident led to widespread protests against hijabs, led by brave women. Research has shown that the anti-hijab sentiment is shared by a large majority of people of all demographic groups. No, woke apologists, Islamic women do not wear hijabs out of choice.
Notably, the same degree of opposition exists in Iran towards being governed by religious law. Yet Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, blames the US and Israel for the protests. You couldn’t make it up.
This, then, is one of the countries that has a seat on the UNCSW.
Among the 45 member countries of the UNSCW are three listed among the worst ten countries for women: Afghanistan, Somalia and Pakistan.
The World Bank has a global ranking on women, business and the law. It assesses 190 countries on various criteria of female emancipation.
One third of the UNSCW members appear in the bottom third of this ranking. These 15 habitual women’s rights violators are Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia, Mauritania, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Pakistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Nigeria, Tunisia, Senegal, and the Russian Federation.
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2022 is not much different, although it adds Japan to the list of UNSCW members with a poor record on women’s equality.
Once again, one has to ask whether the inclusion of some of the worst oppressors of women improve or detract from a body dedicated to monitoring and improving the status of women around the world.
Justification
The UN’s justification for these travesties can be read on the UNHRC’s membership page: ‘By 31 December 2022, 123 UN member states will have served as Human Rights Council Members, reflecting the UN’s diversity and giving the Council legitimacy when speaking out on human rights violations in all countries.’
This is fatuous nonsense. By what magic does the UN believe that such ‘diversity’ gives the UNHRC ‘legitimacy’? It does the exact opposite: recognising and co-opting the worst offenders delegitimises these bodies.
It gives any country on the receiving end of criticism an official tu quoque defence: But what about Afghanistan? But Iran is even worse.
If the UN was truly interested in improving human rights or the conditions of women in member countries, then it ought to convene committees of members with the best record in each area.
It should select a set of relevant rankings or indices, compiled by independent, credible bodies. Then, every year, it should choose the top 40 or 50 countries to sit on these committees. Countries might even compete to improve their rankings to earn seats on these prestigious committees.
The same goes for committees on corruption, democracy, healthcare and education. Let the best countries in the world lead the rest.
Such meritocratic committees would have credibility in reviewing conditions in other member countries, and in offering guidance, advice and assistance in improving those conditions.
The UN is based on fairly decent principles. Participation in the UN should be based on adherence to those principles. Giving equal credence to all members severely undermines any good work such a supranational organisation might do.
Members should earn the right to tell others what they should do, and those with poor records ought to be disqualified from sitting on UN committees.
We can’t have police states, autocracies, theocracies, misogynists and bigots holding court about human rights and the status of women.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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